Teach 'emotions' to help prevent suicide

“EMOTIONAL LITERACY” should be introduced to the school curriculum to help prevent suicide, a leading child and adolescent psychiatrist…

“EMOTIONAL LITERACY” should be introduced to the school curriculum to help prevent suicide, a leading child and adolescent psychiatrist has said.

Speaking yesterday at a Console: Living With Suicide seminar attended by hundreds of teachers in Dublin, Prof Fiona McNicholas said that understanding and recognising emotions were crucial skills that young Irish people needed to learn. The age group most likely to die by suicide in Ireland was between 15 and 24 years, she said, unlike most other countries where it was those in their 60s.

To help combat this she proposed that emotional literacy should be introduced to both primary and secondary school as a subject, just like maths and English. “It would help the understanding of emotions and recognising that there are choices and solutions to what they are feeling other than suicide,” she said.

“It would have a huge knock-on impact on mental health in general and that would have a positive effect on economic productivity.”

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She also pointed to the narrowing gap between young males and females presenting to hospitals with self-harm as a worrying development.

Traditionally, young girls are more likely to self-harm, with boys more likely to die through suicide.

However, she said that in the last year there had been a 10 per cent increase in the number of recorded incidents of young men inflicting self-harm. As males were more likely to complete a suicide, the increase in numbers self-harming could lead to a major increase in the total number of suicides in the coming year.

Also speaking, mental health author and GP Dr Harry Barry said recent research had shown that there was little point in trying to logically talk a student out of suicide as the emotional side of the brain could take preference over the logical side in adolescence.

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